One other Frieze week spotlight: Desk Manners is the second solo exhibition by Natalia González Martín at Hannah Barry Gallery. Bringing collectively two new our bodies of labor – 18 oil on panel work and a collection of miniature egg tempera illuminations – the exhibition showcases González Martín’s evocative signature mix of non secular iconography with modern storytelling. Drawn from her readings of contemporary works in medieval social historical past, together with Renaissance scholar Rudolph Bell’s Holy Anorexia (1985) and historian Caroline Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Quick (1987), the exhibition calls to consideration the fraught intimacy between girls, meals and bodily autonomy, not solely in feminine conventual life however in girls’s quest for liberation via the ages. Juxtaposing classicism along with her personal fantastical allure, Desk Manners celebrates the grave magnificence, energy and power of feminine sainthood in all its enchanting – at instances brutal – symbolism, all of the whereas exposing contested themes of sacrifice, neighborhood, sickness, want and advantage that proceed to impression the lives of girls at this time.
A homage to the legacy of icon work and moveable altarpieces, González Martín’s works on panel current conventional non secular codecs from statuesque, baroque portraits of feminine Catholic saints to luxurious nonetheless lifes glistening with gem-coloured fruits and leaky, perspiring vessels. In them we see González Martín’s constancy to Counter-Reformation masters comparable to Francisco de Zurbarán and his dramatic use of tenebrism and sculptural evocation of type and motion – via to the common-or-garden majesty of Juan Sánchez Cotán’s austere, alluring nonetheless lifes. Regardless of this, every determine is firmly residing within the current second, with delicate imprints of González Martín’s private relationships held facet by facet with hallmarks of feminine saintly martyrdom captured in unassuming verisimilitude: the white lily of Saint Catherine of Siena, a logo of purity that belies the tragic denouement of her deadly self-starvation; the pliers and unfastened tooth of Saint Apollonia of Alexandria, who, based on church custom, was so tortured; or the enduring Sicilian dessert, Minne di St Agatha, a playful however painful reminder of its namesake’s ugly destiny.
Staged with classical composition towards darkish, melodramatic backgrounds, González Martín’s work draw consideration to the gravity and veneration positioned on medieval Catholic girls’s relationship – each symbolic and materials – to meals and its refusal within the identify of piety. And so, discover their complement in a collection of smaller, framed works on paper made throughout her 2024 residency at Castello San Basilio, a tenth century fortified former monastery in Basilicata, bordering Calabria and Puglia in southern Italy. Drawing on her formal and utilized analysis throughout this residency, these works allude to illustrated manuscripts utilized by medieval monks for personal prayer and meditation – small, moveable and lavishly embellished. Utilizing the standard portray strategy of egg tempera, these ornate, delicate works characteristic idealised vignettes of the mutual care and shared meals of beguine communities of the Center Ages, executed with sensible colors and complex borders adorned with gold leaf on the uncommon materials of calfskin vellum, sourced from the only real remaining producer of genuine vellum in Britain.
The apply of ‘holy anorexia’ – the rejection of meals to convey oneself nearer to God – could be seen as a rise up towards the patriarchal forces of the medieval period, enabling girls to reject undesirable marriages or substitute non secular actions for menial duties throughout the household, as a lot as it may well a profound expression of proximity to and shared struggling with the lived embodiment of Christ. A historic phenomenon, but one which nonetheless finds resonance, within the phrases of author and researcher Asa Seresin, with ‘the growth of the wellness motion and its orthorexic prescriptions, [which in] the modern period has seen a resurrection of ‘holy’ self-deprivation’. Importantly, for González Martín the paradox of its goal and the depth of its apply are held in stress all through the veiled narratives of Desk Manners, which collectively transfer from want to constraint, struggling to pleasure, advantage to protestation. González Martín’s exhibition conjures these related, contradictory emotions and extra, presenting an ensemble of characters that subtly showcase and subvert their very own non secular symbolism in favour of a fantastical, modern realism.